Biden's Age Becomes 'Uncomfortable Issue for His Team and His Party,' US Media Says

With US President Joe Biden planning to run for re-election in 2024, “his age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party,” according to The New York Times (NYT).

The newspaper argued that the 79-year-old POTUS is “testing the boundaries of age and the presidency,” and recalled that a year and a half into his first term, Biden is “already more than a year older than Ronald Reagan was” at the end of his two terms.

The NYT cited unnamed current and former senior White House sources as saying that the 46th US president remained “intellectually engaged,” but that he looks “older than just a few years ago.”

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Echoing the sources, the NYT reported that some White House aides “quietly watch out” for Biden, who “often shuffles when he walks” and “stumbles over words during public events,” something that prods the aides to “hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.”

In this context, the newspaper pointed out that the White House is seeking to prevent Biden from “unscripted interactions with the news media,” referring to the fact that Biden has given just a total of 38 interviews, far fewer than his predecessors Donald Trump and Barack Obama, who sat down for interviews 116 and 198 times, respectively.

The newspaper underscored that although Kevin C. O’Connor, the president’s physician, pronounced Biden “a healthy, vigorous 78-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” in November 2021, Biden’s fitness-related questions “have nonetheless taken a toll on his public standing.”

The NYT recalled that “polls show many Americans consider Mr. Biden too old, and some Democratic strategists do not think he should run again.” For example, last month’s survey conducted by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll indicated that at least 64 percent of voters believed Biden was showing that he is too old to be president.

According to the news outlet, if Biden launches an election campaign in 2024, he “would be asking the country to elect a leader who would be 86 at the end of his tenure.” S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studied the candidates’ ages in 2020, told the NYT in this regard that it was legitimate to wonder if a person remains cognitive at 86.

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“That’s the right question to be asking. You can’t sugarcoat aging. Things go wrong as we get older and the risks rise the older we get,” Olshansky added.

Biden has repeatedly been mocked for the number of verbal slip-ups he's made during his nearly five-decade-long career as a politician. The 46th president himself admitted back in 2018 that he was “a gaffe machine,” something that was confirmed once again earlier this week, when he accidentally read the part on the teleprompter that says, "end of quote, repeat the line.” This was preceded by POTUS mistakenly saying Switzerland would be joining NATO instead of Sweden during the alliance’s gathering in late June.